website translation

Having developed the English version of our new website, we are now working hard at the other language versions. We feel that it is important to demonstrate website translation on our own site, as well as providing a service to overseas site visitors.

The Welsh translation is almost ready and will be live this week. The French translation and Flemish translation will be next, and then the Spanish and German versions. Site readers can still view the old version of the site in these languages until the new content is ready. Once all 6 languages are live we will then work on adding additional languages.

Individual sites

We decided to provide international versions of the site with separate hosting. This allows us to have top level domains, and the servers are all in the relevant countries. This is said to help with SEO ranking. However, you should remember that location is just one ranking factor.

Translation and SEO

Google is a text engine. It indexes pages of content, and yes, it does recognise different languages. Ironically, some web developers think its a great service to integrate Google translate into their clients’ websites. Is this a good idea? Definitely not. Health warning; Google translate could seriously damage your site….

Why is that?

Translation is extremely complex, just as languages are very complex. A machine translation programme such as Google Translate, compares tons of text, and tries to match words and phrases from one language with another. If the Google database happens to contain an accurate translation of the original sentence or phrase in its database, then you should receive a reasonable result. In the majority of cases though, this doesn’t happen.

The machine can’t cope with language nuances, such as words with multiple meaning. It may even render a positive as a negative of vice versa. By contrast, a human translator will render an accurate equivalent of your text in the other language.